One Hundred Shades of White. Preethi Nair
since that episode with Mark Fitzgerald, and many of them even listened to me. One day Miss Brown had to go in for a blood test which she made such a big deal out of that I thought she might never come back and teach again. ‘She’s going for a transfusion that might not be a success,’ I said, preparing the class for the worst. She arrived back in class the next day, larger than life, to a pile of bereavement cards. ‘It were Maya, Miss, she said you were gonna die,’ informed Nicola Jory.
Miss Brown muttered something about wild imagination but you only had to look at the size of her plaster to know it wasn’t that.
I had to utilise the fact that I wasn’t touched by the bullies and find ways of keeping my status, so some playtimes I set up stories narrating colourful scenes and turned even the most hardened bully into a goblin or a prince. As I narrated, standing on the bench, they would turn their overcoats into fantastic capes and would vent their anger by slaying some dragon, or would make wishes to wizards that we knew would never be fulfilled. Never did I finish with a happy ending, always with a bizarre twist of fate, otherwise they wouldn’t have played. Fatima became my assistant and made some really good sound effects like the wind and torrential rain. Most times, she was made redundant by the real thing and on those days, I found her something else to do.
Satchin kept his bullies away by mimicking. He imitated his teacher really well, curling up his lip and speaking like she did. He was always full of bright ideas and if any of the kids had problems, he would find a way around it. One day when he saw Amma was struggling to pay for the electric meter, he suggested pawning the Silver Jubilee spoons that our old posh school had given us after prancing around a pole, country dancing. We had kept them safe for an emergency and so, one day after school, we took them to the pawnshop. The broker looked at us and then the spoons and repeated our demands for five pounds a piece. He laughed so hard that his belly shook. ‘How much then?’ Satchin asked authoritatively.
‘Five pence a piece and even then, I’m being generous.’
With his highly developed bartering skills, Satchin said, ‘Ten and you have a deal.’
The man paid him and we ran off, triumphant.
We had meant to put the twenty pence in the meter, but on our way home we loitered for several minutes outside Mr Patel’s sweetshop. We stood there grappling with the thought of a couple of packets of crisps each, a few boxes of sweet cigarettes, four sticks of liquorice and two packets of Bazooka Joe’s bubble gum, and succumbed to temptation and went in. Coming out clutching several brown paper bags, we made a pact to make them last and to share. Neither of us was sure of the terms of this agreement and I began secretly eating the contents of the bags and a few hours later, everything was gone. Satchin didn’t fight with me when he found out, he just looked at me, disappointed.
Our relationship changed when our father died and subsequently when Amma had to work. We knew we were fighting on the same side, so it was pointless wounding each other on purpose. Satchin became very protective towards me and although he would not overtly acknowledge me as his sister, he would wait for me near the school gates so we could go home together. He was the one who had possession of the door key and took responsibility for most things. I was in complete awe of my brother, the way he could do things and make things feel so exciting when they blatantly weren’t. We would run home chasing each other, or take turns to kick empty cans, but always in a world of our own, averting the glances of strangers, not giving them an opportunity to say anything or make gestures at us.
We were acutely aware that all around us, on the streets, a battle was raging. Poverty is a hideous thing, it fills people with a sense of injustice, frustration, inadequacy, even unworthiness, and from then on, a secret war begins inside them. The battle is to become someone, to prove something, and it never ends. Surrounded by derelict buildings crumbling like dreams, burnt-out cars and pavements stained with venomous spit, people fought themselves and each other. More often it was each other. Maggie’s simple home was a sanctuary from everything that lurked outside her battered blue door. An oasis in the middle of everything concrete and void.
Once inside the bedsit, Satchin heated up whatever Amma had made for us and we ate together, washed up the dishes, tried to do our homework and waited for our mother to come home. Sometimes the wait was just so boring that it was better to fall asleep. What Amma did at the factory, we didn’t really know, but she always came home very tired. On Fridays, she brought something back for us: a colouring book, a reading book or matchbox cars, so we always stayed up. We never asked her for things and, believe me, I wanted to; I would have loved some transfers or stickers but Satchin told me not to ask. He said that some nights he heard her crying, saying that she couldn’t give us the things she wanted to, and he said that asking for stuff would make things worse.
On Sunday, Amma’s day off, we went to the park and she sat on the roundabout and watched us play or, on very special occasions, Tom would take us in his van to the seaside. They thought we would enjoy this but I hated the sea, it was a predator like the heavy rains, and predators took things away when you least expected, just like the rain. Satchin and I ran along the beach or played in the arcades and for those moments we could be children. Then on Sunday evening, we would crawl into bed, knowing that soon it would be Monday and the week began again. It could have gone on and on like that and we wouldn’t have known the difference had the seasons not changed.
Despite the cold, winter was like a dream for us. Beautiful snowflakes covered everything that was grey, and temporarily we didn’t have to see the reality of where we lived because everything was painted a soft, fluffy white and we could distract ourselves by building snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other. Summer, in contrast, was difficult. Whilst other kids counted the days until the school holidays, Satchin and I dreaded them. In summer it got very hot and sticky inside so we had to be outside but were told not to wander far. We had six long weeks of being together, which meant endless hours entertaining each other. We didn’t have a television so we tried to re-create scenes and stupid dialogue from the Laurel and Hardy films that we had watched when we were rich.
Hardy is entertaining some ladies and doesn’t have enough money for sodas for all of them, so he tells Laurel (me) to say, ‘No thank you, Oli, I’m not thirsty.’ And when Hardy checks the order with the girls, he says, ‘Soda, soda, soda and what will you have, Stanley?’
Stanley says, ‘Soda.’
He pulls him to one side. ‘Didn’t I tell you we only have enough money for three sodas?’
Stanley smiles and Hardy begins again.
‘Soda, soda, soda and what will you have, Stanley?’
‘Soda,’ I reply. Then Hardy chases me around the room and we fall about laughing. Why we laughed so much, I don’t know, boredom and repetition do strange things. Sometimes we got Jatinder and Simon, two boys who lived on our street, to be the extras but they thought this was boring so Satchin told them about this idea he had to make a bomb.
All four of us went out into the yard and began making a bomb from petrol cans we had found in the street and Satchin added some turps we found out in the yard. He doused a rag with the mixture and Jatinder lit the cloth; it went up in flames immediately and set alight the cardboard box that was next to it. Jatinder panicked and threw the box against the fence. Before we knew it, flames were everywhere and we couldn’t put them out. The Polish man saw us and fanned the flames with the buckets of water he was using to clean the windows. Maggie spotted the Polish man jumping up and down, shouting, and his suit nearly on fire, and came running with her extinguisher. Jatinder and Simon ran off.
Maggie reprimanded us, telling us how dangerous and stupid it was and how we could have killed everyone.
‘Do you understand me, Satchin and Maya, do you understand what you could have done?’ she shouted.
She said she would tell our mother unless we wrote a story about the consequences of fire. Mine was entitled ‘The Effects of Smoke Inhalation’. I don’t know what exactly I wrote as I copied it off the piece of paper attached to the fire extinguisher, but she was very impressed and said there were no two ways about it, I definitely had talent, but it was wasted on doing silly things like trying to burn the house down.